To this day one of the most beautiful games ever created, and yes that is also in comparison to Trine 3 and 4.

Trine 2 is a side scrolling puzzler with a heavy emphasis on its physics engine and strongly influenced by The Lost Vikings. The player controls 3 characters with varied skills who can body-switch in a blink, and fight their way through armies of nefarious goblins and mind-boggling witch’s portal-traps to solve the mystery of the talking flower. Along the way they’ll pick up hundreds of magic potions that unlock new powers in their extensive skill trees, providing new ways to fight and new tools to solve puzzles.

All of this happens in one of the most gorgeously rendered storybook-come-to-life worlds I’ve ever seen realized in video game form. I’ve long since solved the game’s puzzles, but playing it over and over is still a delight to this day, it’s that pretty.

A “lite” city builder that tasks you with creating mankind’s first space colony on the nearly Earth-like moon of the gas giant Aven Prime using TNG-esque levels of technology.

It’s not all juggling power levels with food income and entertainment infrastructure. Aven Prime is teeming with life, much of it unfriendly, like giant sand worms, or floating plague spores, or more intelligent foes who need to be fought off with plasma turrets. The moon’s environment itself constantly throws curve balls, changing seasons from summer to winter in a single day and frequently having lightning and hailstorms. But despite all this the game remains imminently accessible, maybe holding your hand a little too much with constnat tutorial mini-quests that give substantial resource rewards (sandbox mode lets you play without these tutorials).

While a game like Surviving Mars shows what a claustrophobic nightmare being trapped on an Elon Musk-style Mars colony would be, I would love to live on Aven Colony. Building an entertainment center and gaining the ability to explore your creation in a 3rd person chase cam behind a hover cab is an experience that feels hopeful and optimistic in a way Star Trek hasn’t been for decades. It doesn’t hurt that the graphics really show off the Unreal Engine 4 at its absolute best.

Solitaire is a chill game, but gets kinda boring. Shadowhand is solitaire mixed with a Puzzle-Quest-style battle system and all tied around an extensive story of a young 18th century noblewoman who by chance is forced to take on the disguise of a busty highwayman and go on an alarmingly murderous rampage to save her friend and uncover a vast conspiracy. So significantly less boring.

The solitaire game is fairly simple at its core. Cards are fanned out in various piles on the table, and your job is to remove them by picking a card one point higher or lower than the current card in your hand, replacing your hand card with the one removed, keeping it going in as long a combo as you can before having to draw a new card. Longer combos give larger rewards. The combat scenarios have you and the enemy making matches from the same table of cards, with combos charging up your weapons, and longer chains add to a damage multiplier. Weapon attacks end your turn. Sometimes the card piles are locked until you find a key item buried in another pile, sometimes you and your enemy are racing to be the one to grab the healing potion buried under some piles. The game has a surprisingly deep equipment system, allowing you to see the strengths and weaknesses of your opponent and change outfits before every match to maximize your advantage while gradually dressing your protagonist into some kind of lunatic clown pimp.

The one detail that might harsh your chill is this is solitaire at the end of the day, and a bad shuffle is a bad shuffle, even in verses battles. But the game does give you several active powers to turn the odds back in your favor, including a titular Shadowhand ability the re-scrambles the entire table. Do you want the very best Solitaire game ever made? This is it.

An isometric overhead GTA-clone taking place in an idealized sci fi Tokyo at a “Where’s Waldo?” level of zoom. In the future, death has been cured by nano-drugs that restitch people’s bodies back together in seconds, making assassination a much less despised profession. Forced into becoming a freelance hitman to get the underworld contacts necessary to clear your name of a crime you didn’t commit, Tokyo 42 is the chillest game about murder and mayhem I’ve ever played.

You move with WASD and aim with the mouse. Bullets are rendered as 3D objects and need to be lined up vertically as well as horizontally, but this game is much more forgiving than Brigador with the aiming mechanics. At any time you can rotate the camera 45 degrees to get a better angle on your target or reveal new routes to travel in. Occasionally you will get a warning that there’s a rival assassin in the crowd and you need to figure out which random passerby is about to attack. If you go on a rampage, the game has a full GTA-style star system where you’re at first attacked by cops in hover cars, later by “Ghost in-the-Shell spider tanks.

The aesthetic of the game is like Mirror’s Edge if that bright dystopia was much livelier and more inviting. The music is wonderfully immersive and very, very chill. Note that the Smaceshi’s Castles downloadable content is just a series of short puzzle missions a la the VR Missions from Metal Gear Solid on an entirely different map.

A real time 4X game in the vein of Sins of a Solar Empire taking place on a shattered fantasy world made up of floating islands. You and your opponents are the first wizards born in a generation powerful enough to bring the floating shards together and bridge them, setting off a war to see who will be the first to rebuild and subsequently rule the world.

In addition to Sins, Driftland is influenced by the Majesty games. Your army is made up of individual hero units who you don’t control directly, but rather influence their actions by placing reward flags throughout the world. The economy is nothing like Majesty, though, none of the heroes have their own money, you’re instead balancing the limited housing each shard can support with the land-hungry farming necessary to feed them so your citizens can be put to work extracting resources used to equip your heroes with various skills to make them more potent fighters against hostile barbarians and rival kingdoms. The most powerful floating islands you can capture have nests on them where heroes can tame a flying mount ranging from a giant raven to an actual dragon (Dwarves don’t tame, they build their own flying machines). Obviously in a world of floating islands, heroes who can fly have a huge advantage.

Another game that shows off the Unreal Engine 4 at its best. Gorgeous glowing spell effects, close zoom levels that let you see a dizzying horizon of stars above the exposed planet’s core. And each of the 4 factions has their own separate musical score that changes dynamically with the action. I personally love the African Tribal sound they chose for the wood elves’ OST, reminiscent of Civilization 4. Note that there’s a big balance overhaul/expansion coming in June so aspects of this mini review may be out of date very soon.

A pinball Metroidvania! You play a dung beetle tied to a huge pinball who has just been given a job as the postmaster on a magical tropical island, but just as you arrive an ancient evil called the Godslayer has critically injured the Lovecraftian deity who sustains the island. So it’s up to you to gather the island’s scattered elders to heal the deity while delivering everyone’s long-overdue letters and packages.

You can roll your ball across flat stretches dung beetle-style with the arrow keys, but the island is dotted with color-coded flippers everywhere that flip automatically when you hit the corresponding shift key, sending the ball flying with your effectively weightless beetle dangling behind it. Your primary mode of travel will be bouncing your way through ramps and other obstacles behind your ball. The entire island is basically a giant pinball table!

The game is rendered in bright colors with a peppy soundtrack as you bounce and slide your way through its delightful environs. Unfortunately most of the distinct “tables” in the game are solved by shattering their targets, not leaving much room for repeat play in a single session. But this is a game I’ve 100%’ed many times, and replaying it doesn’t get any more old than replaying a favorite pinball cabinet. (Protips: some flippers are hidden in the background and only revealed when you flip them, and the noise maker can explode nearby slugs. You’ll thank me later!)

#1 is still Satellite Reign. A modern re-imagining of Syndicate that nails the rain-soaked Blade Runner vibe. My one complaint about the game is all the action takes place in corporate parking lots, you won’t get into any firefights on the gorgeous streets unless you seriously fuck up.

#2 is Ruiner. If you want the combination of cyberpunk and horror promised by Observer’s trailer, Ruiner delivers, albeit in a way that’s more anime + Suspiria (original) than Blade Runner + Jacob’s Ladder. It’s a modern day belt-scroller (ala. Final Fight) with heavy gunplay and lots and lots of zwee-fighting that’s a fast-paced disorienting blast to play. The main downside is the game’s “everything plus the kitchen sink” approach to abilities leaves the action a little unfocused and holds the gameplay back to “pretty good.”

#3 is Brigador. A vehicle-based isometric tactical shooter ala. those Urban Strike games from the 90s with a PHENOMENAL OST. The vibe is distinctly more John Carpenter than Ridley Scott. Main downside is an assload of unlock cancer.

Honorable Mentions:

Black Future ’88 is a side-scrolling Abuse clone rogue-lite that desperately wants to be the sci fi version of Dead Cells. The cyberpunk aesthetic and especially the soundtrack are epic. The gameplay is shockingly sedate, but that might be a good thing for some players.

Shadow Warrior 2 is a kickass FPS, superior to Doom 2016 in my book. And about a third of the missions take place in a cyberpunk city with you fighting everything from mechs to robot geishas armed with razor fans. Main downside is the crappy inventory screen, but you can totally beat the game on normal without slotting a single upgrade.

Posted
on April 7, 2020, 8:07 PM,
by Mischief Maker,
under Article, Review.

Going stir crazy from being stuck inside all the time? Want to eat the lotus of videogames, but want only the finest curated lotus? Here’s 10 excellent games you may not have heard of, in no particular order, to take your minds off Captain Trips:

For years I’ve wanted a proper clone of Final Fantasy Tactics, but everybody always fucks it up, even the official sequels! But FINALLY, 20 years after the fact, someone made a proper clone with all the mechanics and job system intact, and none of the garbage filler like FFTA’s “laws.”

Graphically it’s unimpressive but not ugly, and the maps are 2D instead of rotatable 3D, but other than that it’s everything I could want out of a modern FFT. You have a selection of 20 jobs to choose from, and the starting jobs have all the basic skills you’d want right away (like standard counterattack). Despite the 2D terrain, battles have all kinds of “Into the Breach” style unit repositioning abilities that let you do things like push an enemy who can’t swim into a water tile for an instakill.

Random battles for grinding are purely an opt-in affair, yet available on-demand, with a preview of the level of enemies you’d be facing at that particular location. Also everyone on your team gets “vicarious” job points from other characters’ experience and start racking up skills in classes they never played (and every class you master awards a permanent stat boost). And if you’re a real FFT min-maxing lunatic, they even implemented a (purely optional and actively discouraged) option to drop a character back to level 1 but keep your skills so you can grind them up in the class of your choice and get exactly the stats you wanted. This is a game that wants to be enjoyed by its players.

Grab it, grind your balls off, create the ultimate team, then raise the difficulty too high and get murdered. Great way to wait out the Apocalypse.

A cheerfully intense twin-stick/mouse WASD overhead arena shooter with transforming stages. The twist is you’re playing an android on limited battery charge and every once in a while enemies drop a battery pickup that obligates you to wade through the crowd of baddies and grab it or risk letting your power run out before you beat the stage.

There are several different androids to pick from, each with their own unique primary attack pattern and powerful secondary attack limited by an overheat meter. (My favorite is Peanut, whose secondary attack is to fly through the crowd behind a pneumatic drill, rapidly destroying the first strong enemy she hits.) The graphics are a soft and colorful contrast to all the carnage surrounding you, and the music is fun and peppy.

I forgot who said it, but the best description I heard for AAC’s gameplay was, “In other arena shooters, it’s you among the robots. In Assault Android Cactus, it’s the robots among YOU.”

A tactical hex-based combat-heavy sci-fi 4X game (set on the surface of a single planet) whose gameplay is heavily based off the classic fantasy 4X “Master of Magic.” The major hook to MoM was finding synergies between the inherent strengths of the fantasy race who made up your followers, and the school of magic your wizard-king specializes in. Planetfall takes that formula and slaps sci-fi terms over all the fantasy talk (“school of magic” becomes “secret tech,” “spells” become “operations,” and the “dwarves” become the “dvar”) but takes full advantage of the sci fi setting to give units tons of interesting new abilities that wouldn’t work in a Tolkien world. As a long-time fan of the Age of Wonders series it’s difficult not to gush about all the gameplay improvements without turning this little blurb into a 30-page essay.

The setting is kind of odd, as it feels more like someone digging through their old toy box from the 80s and waging battles between action figures from wildly different settings (like He-Man vs GI Joe vs Dino-Riders) rather than a cohesive world of its own. Likewise the aesthetics evoke the look and soundtrack of those 80s toy-hawking shows in a way that all the sythwave games miss. A lot of games lately try to “be” 80s, Planetfall feels like something “from” the 80s, all the way down to the 80s hairdo, sunglasses, and Tom Selleck mustache I can give my custom commander.

But come at the game from the standpoint that you are sitting on your bedroom floor playing with mismatched action figures and it’s an absolute blast. Even the lowliest unit now has multiple attacks and support abilities to use in tactical combat, from tossing grenades to overwatch fire. Every unit can slot (and replace) up to 3 upgrades from electric bullets to phase devices that let them walk through walls. Hell, commanders can opt to equip an attack chopper in lieu of a weapon and gain all the abilities of that vehicle boosted by all the skills of the commander. Not being limited to the 4 elements, the secret techs bring all sorts of interesting possibilities that were only hinted at in the fantasy AoW games, like the Xenoplague tech where you outfit your troops with horrifying slimy alien parasites sticking out their backs for super strength and the ability to infect enemies and turn them into tiny facehugger-style monsters which can eventually mutate into giant clawed monstrosities.

Maybe… maybe focusing on the plague powers wasn’t the best thing to focus on right now. There are other secret techs based on wormholes, psychic powers, AI singularities, and more!

The only thing about this game that’s a letdown from Age of Wonders 3 is the strategic map. Instead of the hex-by-hex, what-you-see-is-what-you-get method of territory capture AoW 3 used, Planetfall uses a more abstract system of annexing entire provinces at once, but you can only extract one of the resources located there in an “exploitation” system the tutorial does a crap job explaining. (Note that most reviews of this game are obsolete because it recently had a massive balance and interface update that addressed most of the old complaints. I didn’t buy the game until post-update so I can’t comment on the changes.)

Waste hours constructing your ultimate Amazon warrior riding a T-Rex with lasers attached to its head, then take her to battle against the Strogg from Quake 2. I love this fucking game!

Put simply, the best belt-scroller brawler of all time, at least that I’ve played.

Taking all the best from Final Fight, Streets of Rage, The Punisher, Aliens vs Predator, and mixing them all together into a simple-to-learn difficult to master game. You’ve got Gal, the speedster with an emphasis on aerial combat, Ricardo, the “What if Mike Haggar was a Cow?” heavy hitter, and F. Norris, the technical Ninja with physics defying moves. The sheer depth to this game’s combat mechanics approach Devil May Cry-level combo potential, but all that air-juggling is entirely optional and you can muddle through on basic moves alone without being overwhelmed. (In fact the game has secret moves that need to looked up on the internet, but you can still win without ever touching them).

This probably isn’t a game you want your wife or girlfriend to see you playing, especially with the ridiculous tit-bouncing animation for Gal’s sprite.

In terms of actual gameplay, I would say the one weakness of the game is the one shared by its genre, brawler fatigue, but the fact of the matter is Fight’n Rage saves your progress if you quit mid-game! Greatest. Belt-scroller. EVER!

Speaking of games whose reviews at release are now totally obsolete, Battlestar Galactica Deadlock is a turn-based tactical naval sim in 3D space that started out mediocre, but thanks to many, many heroic patches and DLCs became something special.

The setting is a prequel to the Ronald Moore reboot series. It’s the first war against the Cylons and in this time Battlestars are just the flagships to large and diverse fleets of colonial warships. I really like how this game makes use of models from the original 70s TV series for earlier versions of the ships. Despite being in space, this is a world Moore created in response to years of Star Trek technobabble, so phones come on cords, Viper fighters shoot bullets, and the major thrust of combat is clouds of missiles and torpedoes, sometimes with nuclear warheads in them.

The big thing about this title is it’s more a simulator than an abstract dice-based boardgame. Torpedo swarms are objects moving in 3D space that can be dodged with evasive maneuvers, or blown up in a Battlestar’s flak screen, but only if you’re positioned just right to catch them. Meanwhile those big imposing turrets on top of a Battlestar have a hard time catching fast-moving corvettes and can’t aim at an enemy flying underneath. Add to this deployable mines, fighter and bomber craft, teleporting Cylons, missile-replenishing support craft, and it all turns into a delicate dance of death that’s SO satisfying when you get a perfect firing line and watch the enemy’s ships melt under withering cannon fire.

And then when it’s all over the game has an option to view a replay of the fight and watch your tactics unfold with dynamic shakey-cam to look like a scene out of the show.

Note that this game has a crapload of DLC, but the only ones necessary for a first time player are “Reinforcement Pack” and “Broken Alliance.” The rest are separate campaigns taking place later in the story and you can buy them later.

The Dungeon Keeper series is dead, but there are two excellent, but distinct, spiritual successors: War for the Overworld and Dungeons III. I imagine more people are interested in the differences between the two than a mini review of either one individually so here goes: Dungeons III if you want a singleplayer-focused game based around randomly generated skirmish maps, War for the Overworld if you want a multiplayer-focused game that takes place on hand-crafted maps.

Both games have you playing as a disembodied floating hand of evil who marks blocks of dirt for excavation by your diminutive worker minions, then fills the resulting rooms with amenities to see to the needs of your growing horde of monsters, as well as traps to weaken invading forces of do-gooder heroes looking to slaughter your innocent monstrosities and steal your gold. Both games add a 3-branched tech tree, each suited to a different play style. Both games have a top-shelf voice actor providing narration and occasional commentary, WftO grabs DK’s original Stephen Fitts as a malevolent dark god, while Dungeons III has Kevan Brighting as a storybook narrator whose sing-songey inflection is meant to form a comedic contrast to the carnage and evil you’re wreaking on the world.

War for the Overworld keeps very true to the original game’s formula of keeper-on-keeper battles taking place in underground dungeon structures. Dungeons III is an asymmetrical battle between your underground dungeon which functions like the original game, and the overworld kingdom of good that functions like an RTS. Dungeons III makes the player constantly bounce back and forth between conquering sections of the overworld to harvest evil (for teching up) and destroy hero generators, then returning to the dungeon to fight off hero waves then rearm and rebuild for the next surface foray.

In terms of aesthetics, from the original Dungeon Keeper’s dark comedy tone, War for the Overworld leans more to dark, and Dungeons III leans more to comedy. WftO’s dungeons have more muted colors and much nastier-looking monsters. DIII’s dungeons are by contrast a riot of colors and the actions of your monsters are more cheerful, like the Dr Seussian machine the Orks use to build your traps. Story-wise, War for the Overworld’s campaign is more interesting while Dungeons III’s story is an “Epic Movie” style comedy about nonstop lampshading and references that some people find hilarious but I find odious.

My personal preference is for Dungeons III on gameplay grounds, sticking to the random skirmish maps, but if multiplayer’s your bag, grab War for the Overworld. Note that “Clash of Gods” is the only DLC for Dungeons III that adds any new gameplay mechanics, the rest are all 3-mission mini campaigns and you aren’t missing out on any important story by skipping them.

Need a little excitement in your quarantine? Redout is a hoverjet racing game in the style of F-Zero. Playing it produces the greatest sensation of speed I ever experienced in all my years of gaming.

The game’s clever trick is that the world is rendered in a low-polygon “stained glass” style that makes it easy on the hardware, then buries it in post processing effects. Since it’s all going to be zooming by in a blur anyway, who cares if it’s low poly? The result is a sense of complex cities screaming past as your hoverjet does stomach-churning roller coaster loop-de-loops.

It’s my favorite racing game. And if you aren’t interested in multiplayer, grab the “solar challenge edition” at GOG that gives you all the DLCs at a massively discounted price at the cost of no multiplayer.

The best “maze-builder” tower defense meets the transforming command ship of Herzog Zwei meets Godzilla-sized boss tanks meets the single greatest building destruction engine in gaming history.

You play a malevolent alien force that’s like a cross between the Borg and the Decepticons invading Earth by dropping vulnerable terraforming cores from space that must be protected from earthling armies by your transforming alien fighter jet and all the defensive turrets and laser fences you can build to herd them to their doom. But the Earthlings won’t go down without a fight and on top of the endless tank convoys and bomber formations they field giant boss vehicles with individually-targetable turrets and other weak points that feel like they’ve been plucked from the Ray force games. On top of all this, buildings crumble and topple in incredibly realistic ways and can land on enemy convoys, crushing tanks underneath and forcing the survivors on the other side to find a new route to your core.

Is it an action game? Is it a strategy game? Is it a puzzle game? Whatever the hell it is, it is GLORIOUS!

Tangledeep is a genuine roguelike, built from the ground up with a goal toward fun, and a delightful 16-bit SNES aesthetic.

This game draws inspiration from a lot of sources, like the job system from Final Fantasy Tactics, the Item world from Disgaea, and the breezy controller-friendly interface of Shiren the Wanderer, among others. Instead of a hunger mechanic, healing and the stamina and mana to power your skills is in limited supply and must be gathered by exploring. I really like how movement and positioning is such a key component of combat, enemy super attacks mark the targeted squares one round before activating, giving you a chance to escape or risk trying for a finishing blow. You can return to town whenever you like to sell equipment and get new quests.

Even though it’s a real roguelike and will totally murder you for one absentminded move, the smooth interface, charming graphics, and beautiful 16-bit music make for one of the most pleasant gaming experiences of 2020.

Clone Drone in the Danger Zone is a voxel-based third person melee combat roguelite that’s the true successor to the old Lucasarts Jedi Knight games. I know, shame on me for suggesting an early access game. But the game has been fully playable for over a year and the only thing remaining is the final chapter of the story campaign. Endless mode is where it’s at and it’s feature complete at this point.

The premise is you’ve been kidnapped by alien robots and had your consciousness uploaded into a robot body then forced to fight in a gladiatorial arena until you die while being mocked by a robotic Howard Cosell and Frank Gifford. Their weird text-to-speech voices only enhance the dark humor. But maybe if you survive long enough there’ll be a chance for you to escape and possibly save Earth?

Each round you enter a random obstacle course filled with hostile robots all out to kill you. Luckily you’ve been given a lightsaber energy sword that can slice clean through their voxel bodies. Unfortunately their weapons do the same to you and you could find yourself hopping around on one leg (a difficult but not hopeless situation). If you live, you visit Upgrade Bot and buy new powers like a jetpack, or a flaming sword, or a laser bow, or just extra lives. I’m having difficulty putting into words just how satisfying landing the perfect hit is. This is one of the most visceral combat games since Hammerfight and I love every bit of it. Even if the early access came to a sudden halt right now, the game that’s been released to this point is totally worth it.

Another complete phenomenon, this game took over the world for a little bit in 2013. Dong Nguyen, totally his real name and the developer, took it off the app stores because it was apparently giving him anxiety, although he was reportedly making $50,000 a day with it. There are countless clones, as there were Tetris, which Flappy Bird most reminds me of. There’s an arcade game version that is completely licensed, however, and it has beautiful graphics. Or at least graphics maybe not completely cribbed from Super Mario Bros., haha?

Perfect graphics, perfect audio, perfect story – makes you care about the characters in the game within 20 seconds, which most games never do in several hours – and perfect gameplay. I had to go into the game to take a new screenshot because the ones I had taken in 2010 and uploaded to Steam are seemingly all gone, including the 12 pictures I took of the girl in the Playboy bunny suit for Dead Rising 2. Do I go to Gabe directly about that? I just don’t want the resolution to be all weird.

God, look at that screenshot. The player character saying, “I wonder why the ship teleported me here alone?” together with the frown on the PC’s face contains more drama and emotion in a single screenshot than most games contain ever. The VVVVVV characters were Baby Yoda but 10 years earlier. Writing in games is terrible, but it’s been terrible forever, to the point where something simple yet effective like this stands so far apart from its peers.

pinback says, ” I have put in more hours with this boring, empty game already than all of you put together, and now it’s officially released.

I think it’s wonderful. I am astonished by something every time I play, and usually more than once.

Tonight I was reminded about one of my most favorite things about it, and it’s very subtle, but it’s completely excellent. It is:

When you hyperdrive or whatever it is into a new system, you wind up by the star. The star is very bright, and washes out most of the other stars in the sky. What’s amazing is that the starfield background is consistent with the galaxy map — those are actual stars — but let’s move beyond that, because that’s old news.

What makes me giddy every time is that when you fly away from the star, towards one of the distant planets, and get out of the corona of the sun, the background noise in the starfield blacks out, and hundreds and hundreds of stars show up and shine brightly, like driving from the big city to the middle of nowhere.

If you wanted a space game because you like space, I mean… Christ. There will probably be nothing better than this in my lifetime. Well, there probably will be, but this is it for at least the next decade.

Worm says, “It’s Witcher 2 with a more open world, kind of like Dragon Age Inquisition where there are a few open zones but they’re bigger. Maybe the size of a GTA city? I’m not sure. Combat is a lot of fun, very Arkham without being too braindead. Quests have a number of outcomes and generally involve hunting and killing something which is fun too. Generally I think it’s a solid improvement on 2 in every way and a game that really represents how open world games ought to feel. Story doesn’t get in the way, you’re rarely trapped in endless cut scenes, and it feels good to explore.”

That’s not all Worm said, but I wanted to settle you with the first quote first. Worm also said the following, during a discussion about Ciri being kind of a Mary Sue character: “Honestly I always get surprised when people have more hang ups than me. I’m reportedly the guy who wants to club women to death and eat their skin but I didn’t really have an issue playing as Ciri the God-McGuffin. She zwee fights and loves adventure. Also you get to see old lady tits at one point in her story.”

A genuinely funny game, I would like to think that the writing in Portal 2 is the minimum of what we should expect for computer games. My memory is that the original Portal had a bit of a slow burn for comedy. The entire game was sort of slow burn. This probably means that GlaDOS has ten killer lines in the first two boards because my memory is awful. I do recall that Portal 2 is strap-the-fuck-in funny from the start and kept at it throughout my play.

#5 – P.T. by 7780s Studio (2014)
Original Game Unavailable

(I’m letting go of the fact that 20% of the top ten games of the decade are completely unavailable in their original form. This is the only entertainment medium that pulls this shit and it’s so goddamn dumb and immature. And I get that the Flappy Bird guy was going insane, so fine, but this is purely an asshole move by Konami on this one.)

We all found out later that P.T. is an interactive demo for Resident Evil 7, a fine game in its own right. But there was a spooky ghost (the best kind) running around P.T. and the very simple gameplay decision to make exiting the house bring you right back into the house is the horror bit to end all the other horror bits in the game. It’s genuinely creepy, the art direction couldn’t have created a filthier, more disgusting house if they tried. When I played this I thought that something was going to come after me every time I leaned in to look at something (and they kind of do that a lot in the full Resident Evil 7 game). Admittedly, it’s short to where it never wears out its welcome and requiring the Playstation 4 microphone to solve it is a nice throwback to old console games that had that input device nobody knew or cared about, but were useful for like one game.

It definitely got better as it was patched and became mostly stable. Not 100%. But a lot more playable than when it was released.

New Vegas is probably the first or second best Fallout game from a role-playing perspective, depending on how you feel about the original. It doesn’t put its best stuff in the first two hours, but beyond that things really get fun. Cass is one of the best companions in any of these games, but before I was able to get her to join me I spent 30 hours with Boone. I didn’t say ten words to him the entire time we were together. He did, after all, murder someone in the head that he believed sold his wife to slavery and then he skipped down, which is pretty bad ass now that I think about it. Well, except for the fact that he sniped his victim in the head from a distance and it was at night and the victim was an old woman and he did it from a fiberglass dinosaur. None of those things are bad ass. If it was any softer he would have killed her with a cement milkshake and then denied that anyone on earth had ever made a cement milkshake, especially him.

Oh, Boone.

I used to wonder if people would actually choose to align with the Caesars, as they seemed like cartoon authoritative bad guys, but what have we learned about game players in the last 10 years? You can’t get your dick sucked enough on Reddit if you’re a shitty moderator, of course hundreds of thousands of players probably played the last half of the game in the fetal position, soaked-through in their own piss, becoming total stans for Caesar. They do it every day when they post about games. Choosing any of the other factions – and I’m glossing over the fact that you can make decisions in New Vegas where you really can’t in Fallout 4 – is the right decision but I guess that’s why the game is so good, as there are interesting decisions to be made.

When the moon is out it’s tough to not think that this is a really gorgeous game, too.

And I wish that in-game someone said that the vocalist for the Big Iron on His Hip song died the day before New Vegas starts, as that could explain why the song is played literally every third track on that one station. It would be like the radio stations becoming Rush tribute ones when Neil Peart died.

Because the game is so good I want to quote some people regarding the cut-scenes:

FABIO says, “Every…single…one of the cutscenes involving boss encounters is some contrived jRPG Squaresoft horseshit. First my super character lets a 400 lb. metal man sneak up and cold clock him while Boris and Natasha go for their elevator ride and I thought that was the low point. Then fast forward to a Chinese penthouse and it’s SO SOLLY, G.I. I DIDNT MEAN TO I JUST POOR WEAK WOMAN PREASE RET ME FONDLE YOU WHILE I SNEAK BEHIND AND ha sucker. At least the Barret fight left plenty of ammo lying around. I have no idea what you were supposed to do if you were out of ammo without cloak in the penthouse.”

Arbit says, in reply: “Christ, that was bad. Adam Jensen, a guy with 3 foot blades implanted in his arms, is going to let an obviously augmented woman get all touchy-feely with him? I expected him to get gutted and endure another surgery sequence, only this time Sarif chops off his penis and the stupid parts of his brain because really how fucking dumb can you get.”

The game taken as a whole is a worthy successor to the original Deus Ex and Adam Jensen voiced by Elias Toufexis is the best character / voice actor combo in video game history.

Incomprehensible except when you can actually play, Hotline: Miami is an indie champion. Although the developer had made tons of games before Hotline, so it’s that thing where it only took 40 tries to become an overnight sensation. I’d describe the magic of Hotline: Miami as sort of the ultimate realization of an action figure game that we might have played as little kids, only this time there are all manner of weapons that blow things up nicely. Oh, and when I was playing with toys at age six, the stories I had explaining the violence made more sense. Hotline: Miami is on the right side of frustration versus a feeling of accomplishment. In making me love it over the first five levels and then pissing me off because it was trying to teach me new things about itself, the game sets itself up as an 80s NES throwback – if you’ve solved this game in any fashion with any letter grades in the system, you’ve done something in gaming worthy of respect.

I think this is the best game of the decade and I feel the posts in our forum also bear this out. The fun parts of this game can only be experienced as a video game, which I feel is important for the game of the decade. The graphics are crisp and colorful, offline/bot mode is just as much fun as multiplayer with real humans and you can play it forever and constantly progress at getting better at Rocket League.

Entropy Stew says, “Initial games are chaos and have shit ball movement, because you are matched with other people who are as bad as you are at the game. Get halfway decent, and you start getting matched with other halfway decent players. Then, the game opens up. A goal can easily be scored across the entire field if the ball is not contested properly, and if the net is not defended. The level of ball control is insane given that it’s just a physics simulation of colliding bodies, and due to level of agility your car has. Don’t even get me started on aerials (which I still suck at – finally scored an aerial goal in a game last week though).

This game isn’t soccer, and it sure as fuck isn’t a soccer video game. Those are ass. It’s some kind of hockey/soccer hybrid without rules, with jetpacks. It’s the action man’s soccer. It’s glorious.”

It is glorious. It was a good decade for games. I mean, hell, they’re all good, but I think the games at least in the top 10 will be played and/or remade forever. It is a tad depressing that what we believe are the two best games had no story (Rocket League) and an incomprehensible one (Hotline: Miami) but there’s plenty of story in the other ones.

There’s one last note. This project was made possible because for 10 years people in the Caltrops forum wrote about games and expressed their opinions and let the site be a sort of archival record on how games were perceived at the time. Caltrops needs your support for such a thing to happen again in ten years. Unlike every scam Kickstarter, by saying we need your help we don’t need money, just your takes. So please feel invited to post about the games you like, the games that you love, the games that frustrate you and all the other video game drama in-between. Join us, won’t you?

Worm says, “Yakuza is essentially a game in the spirit of Shenmue but ends up being a lot like River City Ransom as well. The series has always been great and Yakuza 2 might be the best but it’s really hard to say. Essentially it’s a action RPG where you get into random street fights and also you do whatever fucking random shit the developers decided would be fine this includes but isn’t limited to darts, watching porno, karaoke, looking for sparkling shit on the ground, or fighting people. The game is just incredibly dense and really fun and that’s all there is to it. There’s also a pretty good crime drama baked into the space you make to play the main story between playing UFO catchers and fishing. The real tragedy of this series is that it’s a game that everyone should like but Sega has been convinced that it’s for Japanese people and does next to nothing to advertise or hype up the games, beside the first game which was billed as “Japan’s Grand Theft Auto” which is ridiculous since it’s a much better game. Yakuza is a fantastic game that does the kind of shit that every other RPG hybrid tries at and fucking fails and for some reason Sega has just decided that as few people as possible should play it. I don’t think there is a single action RPG that has come out in years that is better than them.”

I am looking forward to future Yakuza titles with more features, like being able to actually quit the game.

Worm says, “I liked Persona 3 and Persona 4 but in the end I feel like this is the first game where the framing of the powers actually fits the slice of life style of the game, rather than saving the city or rescuing your friend from a murder plot you’re making the CEO of McDonalds confess to unfair labor practices so you trend more on twitter, and it just works really well.”

Okay, there’s two things people didn’t like about Superhot. It was very short if you just played the single player game through compared to the cost – 2 hours for $25 minutes. Which in computer games is low, but realistically, it was so much fun I had no problem with it. The last thing is that when you do complete the game, the developers ask all the player to meme up some insipid line, word for word, about how great it is. It was so desperate and awkward and off-putting.

None of that matters when you are playing the game. Time (mostly) stops when you are not moving in Superhot. This gives the game tactics not found in any other shooter. It takes full advantage of this premise and explores so many fun situations with it. In fact, the biggest thing I took away from Superhot after finishing it is that reality is disappointing because we can’t throw stuff at people in the real world and get what they are holding. (And shoot them with it.) (No don’t put that part in.)

They made three of them in the decade, so that skews the numbers a bit, but I think this was the most-referenced franchise. Certainly a good comparison for jokes when people fail at common tasks, like that one guy that couldn’t get past the Cuphead tutorial. But yeah, all the Dark Souls games were mentioned everywhere this decade in our forum and our readers and posters played it a lot. I think it suffers a bit from not getting glowing praise because from what I understand it makes people furious the first few minutes you encounter any new boss.

Rey Mysterio Jr. says, “The fun part from CK2 comes from Dwarf Fortress-esque unintended consequences. Think of it like a game with infinite lives for people who can’t keep it in their pants. Every girl you fuck and knock up is another chance at glory.

In one game in southern France I was doing pretty well until my main guy croaked unexpectedly but was lousy in the sack and left me with an 8 year old princess to my name. A real spoiled shit. Well, she went hunting 5 years later and the woodsman shot her through the heart with an arrow so that my asshole brother who had inherited 1/3rd of his father’s kingdom could take over. I immediately switched to another relative and invaded him.”

pinback says, “The biggest knock on Rimworld is that Ludeon Studios bills it, with a straight face, as a “story generator”. First of all, EVERY game is a story generator, and I have the time I saved the last human family for 63 goddamn waves to prove it. Second of all, shut up. Also, don’t call the various difficulty levels “storytellers”. People who play Rimworld on Twitch even say “okay, we’re beginning a new story” as they fire up a new game. Jesus, just writing this I want to pull it from this list. But you can’t. If it’s a story generator, the story is very much like: Firefly crashes on an alien planet, except all of the characters are completely insane. A virtually perfect survival/colony sim, it gets the future-Western vibe just right, and even if the alien planet seems just the tiniest bit too familiar, you’ll never tire of exploring the world and making it your home.

On one of my first playthroughs, my three insane people were busy setting up shop, when a visitor came to us, asking to join us. She was an extremely unpleasant, irritating lady, but we needed the help. Oh, also, she insisted on being nude at all times. The picture of my three original colonists continually bitching to each other about the obnoxious naked lady working in the next room is possibly the funniest thing I’ve ever seen in a video game. What a hilarious story– ah shit.”

It’s the only Steam game I have that sometimes doesn’t work. The rest of them do. I recently played a “team” game with my nephew. He operated the Steam gamepad. I was at the keyboard controls and trackball in case I needed to show him something. He ejected last and by the time we got to the ground were were top 75. Many, many idiots – 25%, I guess – play PUBG. I don’t mean that they are bad at games, they are just idiots. Anyway, way out on the ass end of the map we were able to get some loot, but nothing with a scope, which is what has been used to kill me every time except for the time I got run over.

It was his bedtime before the game finished. I took over, got into a car, found a guy and was going to turn the tables and run this dude over. Only he shot me through the car. There is definitely an element of, “no matter what tactic you try you suck, no matter what tactic I try, I rock” to it. Surviving for me is at odds of getting valuable combat experience. And what truly matters is that I build shit all day long – software, good relationships, emotional barriers. I don’t need to build shit like we have to do in Fortnite, which makes PUBG superior in the eyes of Caltrops.

Rafiki says, “I got through the first area (bosses + run and guns) in about an hour, game said I died 19 times, but it didn’t feel like it. The airplane level and the flower boss were the most difficult. The second area is kicking my ass. IT’S SO GOOD THOUGH. The genie level! The background! Little genie lamp shoes! I don’t know why that landed with me the way it did, but I loved it. And I love that they change up the bosses a little when you die so it doesn’t get stale and repetitive. I was a little disappointed when I realized a few months ago the game was mostly just boss fights instead of shooter levels with bosses at the end, but fuck it. Shadow of the Colossus was nothing but boss fights and it was great (side note: I am PUMPED for the HD remake). This game is great. Everything is great. I hope this game makes 100 million dollars.”

pinback says, “If people were as nice to each other in real life as the demons are to you in DOOM 2016, the world would be a continuous, joyous celebration of life, and DOOM games in that world would feature bossfights with Aaron Hernandez and hungover Bojangles customers. DOOM 2016 features the “glory kill” mechanism, in which if you punch the demon’s brains straight out of his head, he gives you health! I was originally put off by what I felt was a “gimmick”, but once it becomes part of the flow of the game, you can’t live without it, and every time you do it you want to say “thanks!” Most games don’t care if you play them, they just want you to know how clever they are. DOOM 2016 desperately wants you to play it. Listen: Killing demons the normal way (shooting, exploding, etc.) does not give you anything, UNLESS you are low on something! Gettin’ a little low on health and bullets? BOOP! There ya go, buddy, have a few on the house! They only ever do that when you are low on stuff. They really, really want you to keep killing them.

Motherfuckers are rooting you on.

That’s why the Cacodemons always look like they’re smiling. They’re just happy to see you doing well, and having fun doing it.

Tharsis is a brilliant board game that offers a chilling look into what a large number of absolute dipshit morons that don’t understand anything can do to a game. PC Gamer had a horrible review where the author was too dumb to understand the game. Steam has zillions of brain dead idiots that literally just saw dice in the game (dice are depicted in the game) and shouted “YAHTZEE DURRRR RRR!” in their negative reviews and said it was all random numbers.

It isn’t all random numbers. And you know that because you are an intelligent person that comes to Caltrops.

Tharsis is a wonderful implementation of something that could be a crisis-management board game, but it optimized for computers. There are plenty of decisions that can be made at each turn and plenty of disasters that keep each subsequent game fresh.

pinback says, “If you can handle games that actually test you instead of patting you on the back every five minutes, you can’t go wrong.”

Worm says, “Really fun game actually. Reminiscent of Omega Virus to me. You basically play a board game version of stranded space ship where you’re constantly patching the hull to make it to your destination. It’s really great – being overwhelmed feels overwhelming and just hanging on feels like you’re just hanging on.”

#29 – POKEMON GO by Nintendo, 2016
Available on your phone in the app store.

This was a phenomenon. I attribute all the thinking a person does about a game to a game’s entire “rating” when trying to determine how good a game is. I hope that makes sense, I don’t know if it does, so I’ll try to explain. When I was a kid and we had maybe three computer games, I’d spend entire weeks thinking about how to get past certain puzzles in Zork. Not every moment of every week – in my middle school you had to also navigate your way around the future serial killers and other young failures, but those puzzles were on my mind. Similarly, you’re “playing” Pokemon Go from the moment you leave the house and go into the forest and throw balls at the Pokemons to when your parents have to pick you up, or until kids today finish cutting out the paper doll clothes for the guns they’re going to bring into school. Or whatever their days look like, not an anthropologist over here. I’m just a man that noticed that kids and adults alike were showing up late to school and work for this game and I’ve rated it accordingly.

Mischief Maker says, “Shadow of the Colossus meets Dark Souls meets Devil May Cry meets Magic Tower. It’s one of those games that shot for the moon and came close enough to be amazingly unique. With a team of up to 3 AI-controlled “pawns” by your side, fight gigantic mythological monsters ranging from Chimeras to Cyclopses to the titular dragon by climbing all over them and stabbing them in the weak spot. People complain that the AI pawns are dumb, but there’s actually a game system where you “teach” the pawns how to fight enemy types by building up their knowledge bar, and can give it a boost by actually demonstrating the technique (like throwing an explosive barrel into a Hydra’s mouth). Once the bar gets high, they get pretty crafty in a fight. Protip: play as a hybrid class.”

Mischief Maker says, “Not only the best Shadowrun videogame of all time, but a serious contender for one of the best plot-heavy CRPGs of all time. It may not examine the human condition very deeply, but when the time comes to throw a moral decision at the player, it always throws a curve ball.”

FABIO says, “I’ve never given a harder “fuck you” to any NPC than Luca.

I have to audition to impress this Chinstrap McGee, who may or may not pay me at the end depending on how hard I make him stroke his soul patch? I did the first mission out of sheer curiosity then told him to get the fuck out of the neighborhood.”

FullofKittens says, “There are four-ish animatronic dummys that are out to kill you.

Two of them (the bunny and the duckling) rove around the building, and will occasionally walk to your office to see if they can get in. If they can (the door is open), then they’ll walk in and kill you. (They technically can only kill you when you put the camera down, so if you have it down when they “walk in” then it seems like your door button is jammed, and then you’ll get killed after you check the camera again.) The only way to stop them is to keep their respective door closed, but of course you can’t leave the door closed because that… wastes power(?). When they walk up to check if you’re available, they’ll hang out in the camera blind spot for a few seconds. If you see them there (by hitting the light), lock the door until they get bored and wander away. They are the most common encounter.

There’s a fox dummy hiding behind the curtain in Pirate Cove. He is picky about how often you check on him with the camera: on some nights, he will come for you if you never check, on some nights it’s if you check too much, and on some nights it’s got to be just right. You can tell he’s starting to think about coming down because he will part the curtain and start looking at the camera. If you check Pirate Cove and he’s not there, he’s coming straight for you: you have several seconds to close the left door. If you look at the hallway between you and him, he starts sprinting towards you and you will probably die, you have like one second to close the door.

Then there’s Freddy, who allegedly adapts to your gameplay, can teleport in past locked doors, and really can only be stopped by keeping him at bay via a combination of watching him watching you from the hallway and keeping the right door closed. Freddy is also the dummy that gets you if you run out of power. He doesn’t really start moving until Night 3 or 4 though.”

It was a phenomenon. The creator made 4 sequels in a year and eventually made a game, “FNaF World” that was unfinished and broken and he had to pull it. Which is a shame, the jump scares and sense of dread was so real in the first one.

There is an unwarranted organizational arrogance in regards to storytelling at Rockstar for the story mode to their Grand Theft Auto games, considering that at best they are a 10th-rate imposter of MAD Magazine and at worst they are a collection of insipid young nerdlings who clearly aspire to make terrible films and Scarface posters. Nobody has ever needed to hear what a GTA game has had to say; they are incapable of saying anything meaningful in single-player mode. It would be forgivable if we could bypass cut scenes but we usually (always?) can’t.

We like these games because we get to rampage in beautiful cities. I tried multiplayer for GTA5, though, and it was one of the most fun experiences I’ve ever had on-line.

Part of this is because my friends are funny, but with all the chaos in a typical GTA5 game you can’t help but sit back and laugh when your friends are enjoying it with you. We went on a couple missions and even just hanging out in one of the character houses, before the mission began, it was great. They have set up a system where it really is just you and your pals, we didn’t have to bother with the miserable screeches of typical on-line players. Our avatars looked ridiculous, I loved it. Multiplayer is setup to allow me, a zero-day, zero-level newb, hang with my more experienced (at GTA5) team mates. A wonderful decision, I was a bit worried that I’d have to “level up” first, but those in charge realized that just because someone is zero-level at GTA5, they juuuuuuuuuuust might have been playing games in general since Combat.

In fact, I can’t recall any of the single-player problems in multiplayer. The missions made sense, had good pacing and were interesting. At one point I was driving a car and a friend was able to set a waypoint for us, which was great as I hadn’t done that on the PS4 before. That was handy! The entire system seems streamlined to allow the four of us to simply HAVE FUN. We only played for a few hours, but it’s a goddamn triumph.

An excellent addition to what has been a franchise that really made you say, “It’s a great game, but” before this. There’s no buts now.

I knew it was a good game but I had no idea what could be beyond the first couple of hours. Then SsethTzeentach came out with this video. In no order, this is one of the greatest YouTube reviews I’ve ever seen, this instantly sold me on getting the DLC or expansion or whatever for UnderRail, it made me put another few hours into the game and it’s the greatest commercial anyone could ever make for a game. I think the culture of video reviewing is a natural step in game reviews because so many written-word game journalists hate games or the hobby or their readers. This video is bursting with JOY. A vicious joy, sure. A macabre joy… but joy.

There was a game once, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, that gave you a T-removing machine. When you use it you can remove the letter “T” from things – a rabbit becomes a rabbi, that sort of thing. Emily Short took that mechanic, introduced a full-alphabet letter remover and seamlessly integrated it into an 8 hour text adventure. There is so much more going on in the game than just a fun text adventure toy to play with, there is real depth to the player character relationship with themselves (sic) and an entirely different world and reality to explore. This game is from an artist at the height of her powers and probably the one I’d give to a veteran adventure game player looking to try a text game for the first time in years.

A Kickstarter success story, they screwed up the balance at the beginning for Wasteland 2 and didn’t exactly correct it for the very first patch. It eventually became one of the best RPGs of all-time with the Director’s Cut. One of the best “moving little dudes around the screen” tactic games, Wasteland 2 implemented a game design choice to have the player pick one of two maps or boards to “save” at the beginning of the game, letting the other one rot. That’s a ballsy decision, making it so that some percentage of your game will never be experienced by players on their first playthrough, but what the hell, it was their backers’ money. A worthy sequel to 1986’s original for home computers, there are fun squad-based tactics, decent writing and in-game decisions with consequences.

Bob Bates made two games under the Infocom label – the Sherlock Holmes and Arthur ones – and then co-founded Legend Entertainment where he worked on games like Spellcasting 101, Eric the Unready, Gateway and Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon. Those are really solid games. Bob didn’t stop thinking about what makes a good text adventure since Infocom broke up though and what Thaumistry is, is a close-up view of a guy that never lost being able to craft a game in a genre that at one time was the best genre in the world. This is a throwback (in terms of author competence) with modern sensibilities so there isn’t a lot of dumb text adventure parser confusion.

Your mission in Devil Daggers is to stay alive for as long as possible. A good game is, what, 200 seconds of it? I tried everything to get the counter to increase without actually playing the game. I tried to pause the game. I tried to shut the game down via the Task Manager and hop back on, hoping it would pick up where it left off. I tried to lock up all of my computer’s memory and freeze Devil Daggers that way by running two concurrent tabs of Chrome. The game itself – throw daggers at enemies that are trying to kill you – is great, but the game inside the game, which is attempting every maneuver possible to cause the timer to keep ticking while the game is paused – well, that take on the game I can at least mess with for more than 25 seconds per attempt.

Pinback says, “Originally a (winning) itch.io Game Jam submission, a much-expanded, full version is now out on Steam.

It’s a Sokoban-y, block-pushing puzzle game, with the following, wonderful twist: Some of the blocks are words, and the rules of the level are spelled out in these words. The three blocks “WALL” “IS” “STOP” all lined up mean that any wall blocks will stop you. But if you push one of those blocks away, WALL is no longer STOP. One of the main rules that the levels begin with is the titular “BABA IS YOU”, but even this most basic rule can also be mutated based on how you push the words around. Every level provides at least one joyful moment of unexpected discovery and clever rule-bending.

It is the most brilliant puzzle game you will play this year, and maybe ever. If you don’t believe me, which you don’t, you can still play the Game Jam version for free here, and then instabuy the Steam version and come back and apologize for doubting me: https://hempuli.itch.io/baba-is-you

I am always worried that games like Akane are from a genre that I haven’t seen before, so I attribute everything cool about the genre to the first game I played of it. Like if the first shooter you ever played was TekWar. It’d seem pretty revolutionary. I haven’t seen other games like Akane, so if I’m the asshole here, just let me know. The gameplay has you playing a gal with a sword and a gun. Enemies – some ninjas – come out in waves. The easiest thing to do is to hit the mouse buttons to slash them with your sword.

But you get a gun, too. There is a significant cooldown when it comes to the gun, so you can’t use it too much.

The gun is activated by hitting the left shift key. I don’t believe there is a way to remap keys in Akane. When you are hitting left shift … well, if you can still move (via WASD) while doing that you’re superhuman. Therefore, Akane gives you a gun to shoot these clowns in the head, but the specific key used means you have to make a decision as to how much moving you’re doing. And while left shift activates it, you aim with the mouse. I said in my original review that it’s like Defender in so much as the controls are “advanced” and mastery of them is required to get good at the game.

Mischief Maker says, “The best yet implementation of the Painkiller-school of FPS design with randomly generated maps chock full of explosive items to blow up in your enemies’ faces. I prefer it to DOOM 2016, the mobility is superior and instead of canned fatality animations, enemy dismemberment is dynamic. It’s also jaw-droppingly gorgeous but surprisingly easy on the hardware requirements. The one ding against the game is the menu for navigating weapon upgrades is a little awkward, but you can beat the game on normal without slotting any upgrades.”

This is ICJ again. I just want to add that Shadow Warrior 2 gets big points from me because the graphics are probably still top-5 for me, in terms of all the games I’ve ever played and it is the only game I’ve ever played that does the checkpoint thing yet has checkpoints often. Shadow Warrior 2 looks nice and wants you to play with it.

I brought up Saints Row 4 to get a screenshot for this piece of the article. It has cloud saves, so I restarted where I last played, which was a couple years and one PC ago. My player character isn’t wearing anything but boots and glasses. There is a giant mascot-like character rampaging in a town and doing Magneto shit like flipping cars around and bringing people up in the air and letting them fall. I start shooting at it, but when I start doing that cops start shooting at me. I get the mascot-monster-thing’s attention and a Brinks truck comes out of nowhere and smashes into it, sending it flying. I take the opportunity to start shooting the shotgun I have at it and then it attacks me some more.

This was INSTANTLY after loading the save game.

Why did I ever stop playing this? Why is this franchise less famous than GTA or Red Dead Redemption or others in the genre? Has there ever been a game more serious about instant carnage, mayhem, fun and craziness than Saints Row 4?

Here’s the latest perfect Mario game from the perfect publisher. Just perfect. Everything about the franchise has been absolutely perfect since Donkey Kong 3. Not a single screw up, not a single game that isn’t addictive. Not a Sonic R to be found. SMO is gorgeous, it sold (and sells) Switches, the jumping is right, the movement is right and the new thing – the hats – well of course that’s perfect too. They took the one thing that Tron games had and made it their own. It’s the latest perfect game in the perfect franchise so enjoy, it won’t get better than this until they make the next absolutely perfect Mario game. God, I’d love to fuck up the mascara on this one just once. Just once make Mario raise an eyebrow toward Luigi and say something like, “He’s not really going to leave that Kool-Aid spill for us to clean-a, is he?” as I’m eating cold fried chicken on the (their) couch. Some rebel at Nintendo that leaves work before 9PM: send me an e-mail if we can do Mario in a text adventure.

It’s been a bad decade for sports games, and I am someone that loves sports games. The NFL sold exclusive rights for football to the EA Sports Madden series. My brother has played each one of these non-stop for ten years and beyond and he loathes the franchise. Baseball’s been dogshit since the Hardball, Micro League and MVP series left and the Super Mega Baseball franchise is okay but not good enough that anyone mentioned it for this list. That leaves hockey and basketball and since most people on Caltrops are Canadian, the NHL series got some love. I’m picking NHL 16 because that is the one I played and it has Connor McDavid and Jack Eichel in it and frankly, that’s the bare minimum I need out of these games, at least give me those two guys.

I bought the NHL ‘xx series from EA for almost 15 years and grew to hate them at the end. I was prepared to hate this, but NHL 16 is good in both arcade and “simulation” mode. Additionally, you can just start up a shootout between you and the person next to you. There are no real issues with this game – maaaybe “Normal” mode is too easy and “Advanced” or whatever the top mode is, you need to be perfect, but like we said in Banished this is a GAME, I expect that. I played almost an entire regular season on this, which I haven’t done since EA’s NHL 99. (Which, I learned, doesn’t end after 82 or 84 games, whatever it is, it just let me keep chugging until game 105 with no playoffs when I stopped. I’m sure Roger Goodell’s dick would puncture his slacks if told about that bug.) One more thing – in the screenshot, Eichel is wearing #15. I successfully bought a knock-off jersey from China for twenty five bucks when he was a rookie. I was shocked it arrived and fit a US American. For a second I didn’t even hate the Chinese government. Then Eichel decided he wanted to change to #9 and did so, rendering my jersey a relic. Thanks, Captain Jack. Thanks, Jack and Free Hong Kong.

I don’t have a motorcycle any longer. I was moving and there was a dirt road leading to the new place and it wouldn’t stop snowing in early 2019 and after spending $500 to get it fixed in November of 2018, the thing wouldn’t reliably start in March of 2019. I was just done with it. Additionally, my neighbor twice chased off would-be car thieves for me and was going through a bad turn, so I just gave him the bike. The one thing I needed to communicate to him is that riding a motorcycle without a helmet – well, you figure out why they had to make LAWS in some states forcing you to do it. It’s great, it’s the best thing ever. Zooming around by yourself in April or early October with no helmet? It’s better than most of the games on this list. We’re ranking just human experiences after this and heads-up, after reading the tea leaves on the forum for this one, riding a motorcycle without a helmet is well above anything involving condoms and most experiences featuring dental dams. It’s a crazy, dangerous thing to do to yourself and your loved ones and of course you shouldn’t do it. But if you do do it once you realize why they have to legislate it, that’s all I’m saying.

Welcome to the Caltrops list of the 50 best games of the decade, which was from 2010 to 2019. Here is a link to the previous article, which had some honorable mentions. And if you’d like to discuss the list with people, please do! This is the way to the Caltrops forum.

There was an attempt by Electronic Arts to make an online Sim City game that was online all the time, even in single-player and of course the release was incompetent and they even said themselves it was dumb. Eventually they made an offline mode for this single-player game like they were doing us a favor. The game was awful, the maximum city size was small and it seemed like that was the end of SimCity games.

Then Cities: Skylines was released. Holy shit, it was amazing. This was “all EA had to do” and by that I mean not attempt to go cryptofacsist on their customers, but of course they can’t do that. Cities: Skylines is a beautiful, immersive game that the Caltrops forum spent weeks HGLUAHGLUAHGLUAing over. We all played it and loved it.

“Yeah, but for a Wittgenstein city aren’t you mostly just yelling at all the new citizens to leave? 8)” — Mysterio, 3/11/2015

On one hand, it seems less than ideal to include a game that so frustrated valued forum member FABIO. On the other hand, he came around on it and XCOM2 had lots of advocates. The thing is, XCOM and XCOM2 are always going to be behind the eight ball when they start. X-COM from 1994 is possibly the greatest computer game ever made. XCOM2’s objective is to be better at being an X-COM game than the RoboCop and Total Recall remakes were at being RoboCop and Total Recall. And I think that while XCOM2 makes some odd choices (the 4-troop limit, starting you with pre-made characters, having panic when the troop limit is 4) they are much better at attempting to recapture what the original X-COM game did 25 years ago than most soft reboots and remakes. We have an entire base where the topic is Guess Who Fucked Up X-COM now. The highest praise I can give XCOM2 is that they didn’t.

The first time I played Retrobooster, I just wanted ten minutes of solace. My life is a lot less hectic now, but Retrobooster is so much fun because it’s the next game in the Asteroids -> Asteroids Deluxe -> Choplifter -> Gravitar -> Gravitron 2 lineage. You’re in a gorgeous alien world where your mission is to shoot down enemies and not squash little guys who are on your side. The game’s writing is beautifully integrated within the actual game world while you’re playing. We’ve seen things like the high score table being part of the experience in, say, Omega Race, but I can’t remember ever seeing this effect before. It forces you (at times) to read or shoot. And it looks so good when things are blowing up.

Roop says, “I looked through my Most Played Steam List, and it was all just games I ran multiple times with mods, like Skyrim. I wouldn’t call that close to game of the decade, but because of all the creative mods I sure spent a lot more time than I should have with that janky fucking thing. Then there’s Warband. I didn’t ever mod that one but holy crap, I spent so many hundreds of hours on that game and then all over again on each of the two expansions. It’s clearly my most loved game… and it’s almost sad really. Not once did I ever finish a campaign!

pinback says, “Awesome combination of deckbuilder and roguelike. If you like either of those styles, I find it impossible to think you wouldn’t get into it in a big way.”

Rafiki says, “This game is great and very addictive. The UI is damn near perfect. Cards display how much damage or block they’re going to do, and if you have modifiers that raise or lower the amount it’s automatically reflected on the cards themselves and colored green or red to let you know if you’re doing above or below the base amount. Relics that trigger after certain events, like every 3 turns, 10 attacks, or 6 plays, helpfully have counters attached to them. Each turn, you can see what an enemy plans to do (attack, defend, buff, etc) in a little icon over their head so you can plan accordingly. If you want to know what a buff or debuff is on your or an enemy, just mouse right over it and a clear and concise tooltip will explain it. Whoever designed this UI deserves an award. If I could make a single change, it would be to the damage modifier for vulnerability. Vulnerability makes an enemy take more damage, and to see the damage increase you have to drag a card and hold it over the appropriate enemy to see what the effect will be. I’d love to just be able to mouse over an enemy and have the cards auto-update, although I can see why they did it the way they did since you can sometimes have 10 cards in your hand which crowds out the ability to see the effects of all of them.

The artwork and presentation is simple, but it’s fine. You’re not going to really remember any enemies or attacks, but you’ll be focusing on your hand anyways. The upside is you don’t have to sit through 20 minute Final Fantasy animations. The cards are where the bulk of the artwork went and they look good, and the cards for each character have completely different visual styles, which is really nice. The music is good and doesn’t become grating after repeated playthroughs.”

This is what Erik Wolpaw said about this game before it was released: “[Jay] Pinkerton and I spent about a month breaking story with Justin Roiland on Trover Saves The Universe. Here’s the trailer, which contains a lot of swearing. And I don’t mean like one or two “damns” 30 seconds in, either. The hardcore swearing starts at second zero and then continues pretty much uninterrupted by words that aren’t swears for about 3 minutes.” Rather than link to that, I will link to this extended ad that came out, which is hilarious and this fake ad by RedLetterMedia. RLM was told to just make something funny even if it had nothing to do with the game itself.

I bought Trover on day one and the game itself is just as funny as the ads are promoting it. Look, video games are usually extremely unfunny. Most games are not even good enough to make you push slightly more air through nostrils than one normally pushes. There are jokes everytime you go to do something in Trover and they always made me laugh. Maybe it’s because I enjoy anything Justin Roiland says, but if you’re looking for the funniest game of the decade, it’s this one.

Billed as a city-building strategy game, inspired pinback to write the following:

These are the main complaints in almost every critical review I’ve read of this game.

1. It’s TOO HARD: Hey genius, that’s why they call it a GAME. A game about SURVIVING with a handful of numbnuts in the middle of nowhere. I’m sorry you keep running out of food and wood. Perhaps click “restart” and try something else? Plenty of people have managed to build thriving towns of hundreds of citizens, even without whining about how hard it was to get there! If you just want to hang out in the woods and have everything go right for you, play fucking Proteus or some shit.

2. The UI SUCKS: This one I truly cannot forgive. The UI is fantastic. How did that one review put it:

“This doesn’t excuse the woeful interface, how it presents itself as prettily minimalist but in fact you need to manually keep open and arranged several, heavily statistical and visually tedious windows throughout.”

LOLOLOL. SEVERAL TEDIOUS WINDOWS. Look: open the little town summary window. Open the job list window. YOU ARE DONE! And they cover about 1/20th of the screen, and give you everything you need to know about everything. I can’t help it if your contacts prescription is off and you can’t read the tiny little numbers and letters, but when you can do and see everything you need to play a game, AND the main screen is still perfectly visible and uncluttered, THAT’S A GOOD INTERFACE.

And how do you “manually keep open” windows? Look, they stay open all by themselves! SCIENCE!?!?

I can’t believe ONE GUY wrote this entire game. It’s the most compelling city-builder I’ve played since SimCity 2000.

Max Payne crossed with Contra crossed with Hotline Miami. And it looks great and it’s about a bipolar person. Caltrops has a long history of letting bipolar people’s behavior slide, and My Friend Pedro is no different.

The game uses “ballet” in its description, which I first saw used with the original Max Payne game. That took a lot of guts, to go the other way to describe their game using that word at that time when the press turned on Romero for being too manly about his marketing. Max Payne as a franchise has really lost its way and although My Friend Pedro is 2D, it’s a fine successor to making gunplay poetic.

(I’m amused by the fact that after release they tried re-branding this as “Marvel’s Spider-Man.” As someone who bought it on day one I can tell you, quite categorically, that nobody was calling it “Marvel’s Spider-Man.” If you’re going to pretend there aren’t a bunch of other games that have the exact same name because your marketing team is dumb then at least have the balls to stick with that decision and not try to get us all to call it something else later, you cowards.)

There is a guy that cosplays in the area where I work in a Spider-Man costume, and it’s the one from this game. It is my goal to take a photograph of this man, therefore sort of turning me into Peter Parker when he dresses up as Spider-Man. The cosplayer sometimes gets asked to leave the area by security and I think if the place where I work ever gets exploded by the Hobgoblin shortly after security ran off the guy already dressed in the Spider-Man costume, my call to 911 is going to sound a lot like Kevin Cosgrove’s although I’ll be a lot more disappointed and my call will have a lot more sighing.

Entropy Stew, a programmer, says, “That is the best recommendation I can give to any game, because I just don’t play to the end anymore. I could have been playing Zelda of all things, but this drew me away. It’s the best money I’ve spent on a game since Rocket League.”

Welp, I went through the comments on Caltrops and found this post by skip where he talks about the awful work conditions the developers put their remote workers under and this post by Jsoh Cable where he states that the alpha might turn into something nice after a thousand more updates. None of this really affects the game itself, of course.

It did get a good number of votes and I’ve had multiple jobs where people have talked about how much they love it at work. There’s a thread on their forum where the developers simply ask the question, “What did you do in KSP today?” and it’s got 15,000 replies. And they are still updating it, so I guess it really did get that thousand updates Jsoh was asking for.

It’s time for the Caltrops list of the best games of the decade. How was this list made? By discussion on the Caltrops forum over the last ten years, voting e-mails written to the admin, outright voting in one of our threads and interpersonal discussions the admin had with regulars. Some of the voters who voted for the list are friends with some of the developers whose games made it onto this list. And I have been informed that forum member Commander TDARCOS had sex with the Victor Vran team. I assume. The notes given to me just says he made them gag. With that, here are exactly zero of the top 50 games, but instead the HONORABLE MENTIONS!

MARVEL PUZZLE QUEST by Demiurge Studios (2013)Steam LinkThoughts by Caltrops Senior Writer Jerry Whoreback:
I just finished Marvel Puzzle Quest. Not as good as the original Puzzle Quest, much better than Puzzle Quest 2, it was fine. I think I would’ve liked it more if it was harder and if I didn’t have to level anyone up or unlock anything. I liked that I could have Storm on my team from the beginning. I didn’t like that unlockable Mohawk Storm was treated as a different character, so none of the special moves I unlocked for regular Storm would carry over. I like mohawks more than most, but I’m not going from a Storm with all the special moves to a Storm with none of the special moves. I’m not stupid.

There wasn’t a whole lot of Marvel artwork, probably one drawing of each hero at rest, one of them attacking, and a profile bust for the status bar. No animation to speak of. There were dozens of heroes, but most of them were unlocked without any special moves, and unlocking special moves was a random grinding thing that took forever. I finally got She-Hulk near the end and added her to my team for the final battles, despite her being completely useless without any moves. Even carrying a full one-third of my team as dead weight it was still too easy – not only did I never lose, I was never even in danger of losing. And I’m not some Bejeweled master, always thinking three turns ahead; I’m mostly thinking about what She-Hulk’s bum would look like if I could turn her picture around.

I can tell I liked Marvel Puzzle Quest well enough because I’m just bursting with suggestions for how to make it better, and fluids to spray all over the back of She-Hulk’s picture. I don’t have any idea how you could make Limbo better except to make it a different game.

There is a fun bit in the Wikipedia entry for Frog Fractions. “[Developer Jim] Crawford released Frog Fractions earlier than he wanted, when he sent an incomplete version to the 2013 Independent Games Festival as a ‘Main Competition Entrant’ but was told that he needed to increase the game’s popularity before it would be accepted.” More detail is in the original source: “[Crawford] had submitted an unfinished version for review at the Independent Games Festival, but was told he needed to build more buzz around the title. The irony, he says, is that building buzz is why he submitted the game in the first place.” It is very, very nice of Jim to use the word “irony” because reading about this for the first time this week, I would characterize what the IGF said as “abject stupidity.” Imagine holding tryouts for your baseball team and then telling the most promising walk-on that you’ll sign him if only he increases his follower count on the Gram. I’m sure not every one of these festivals or jams are staffed by idiots but it sure seems that way.

PREY by Arkane Studios (2017)Steam LinkThoughts by Worm:
Prey (2006) will forever reign as having the best opening of any FPS ever. You play arcade games in a bar and then two guys try to fight you so you beat them to death with a wrench and your girlfriend screams at you. Little does that twat know there’s an alien invasion and your recent manslaughter won’t even matter.

Alternatively, Prey (2017) had a cool idea but decided to just give you a tutorial and have everything go to hell, just like every FPS ever, except the ones that start with things already gone to hell.

Altogether this is the Skyrim space station game, it’s fun and feels seriously influenced by System Shock to a point where it’s the actual System Shock 3 you wanted BioShock to be. You walk around and have quests and find people’s bodies, shit pops out and scares you and whatever it’s a good time.

Worthy is a brand new Amiga game that was released in 2018. The premise of the game is that you’re a “fearless boy” collecting all the diamonds on a particular level to prove to the gal in the game that you are (wait for it) Worthy. Each level has like 50 diamonds and the boy has to navigate traps and things trying to kill him. When I last bought a diamond ring all I had to navigate was the fact that carriers stole half the packages sent to our house in downtown Denver and literally not a single thing was done by the complete wastes of space at the postal office servicing our area. It’s not that Worthy teaches us that there are monsters when it comes to delivery of packages containing priceless gems, what Worthy teaches us is that those monsters can be defeated.

(The post office that used to be ours eventually closed.)

LEGEND OF GRIMROCK by Almost Human Games (2012)Steam Link
jeep says, “It’s just like Eye of the Beholder, but now your computer is fast enough that you can maneuver around the enemies. if you can even remember the Eye of the Beholder games you have a big advantage because the walls and stuff have secret buttons in the same spots.”

The amazing thing that Almost Human Games did is create a grid-based CRPG crawler – a “blobber” if you will, on their own. As opposed to what inXile did, which was scam thousands of their fans out of one and a half million dollars based on blobber nostalgia and then just make some unfinished … thing that had absolutely nothing to do with CRPG blobbers in any way. (When reading the word “thing” there, I mean to be mentally heard in the same way that Hans Gruber, who helped us bridge the gap between the original Nazis and neo-Nazis when we needed something in between the most, might show contempt toward Sergeant Al Powell when he learns that Al is impotent when it comes to blowing people away with machine guns during his – Gruber’s – lifetime.)

Posted
on September 25, 2019, 7:25 AM,
by Mischief Maker,
under Review.

No Man’s Sky has recently released yet another disappointing update that adds a fresh coat of paint to its lifeless Potemkin Village of a galaxy, but fails to deliver the living world promised by the infamous E3 trailers where I could join in, I could take sides. Defenders of No Man’s Sky say that delivering a living world is unrealistic, it’d take 50 years and $500 million to produce a game like that, “you ask the impossible!” But then, like Yoda lifting Luke’s X-Wing out of the swamp, indie developer Soldak not only creates procedurally generated worlds far more alive than even NMS’s wildest promises, it’s been making them for more than a decade.

Din’s Legacy is Soldak’s latest “living world” ARPG. While the game is as straightforward to play as Torchlight, the procedural world building, event generating, and player character mutation approaches Rimworld levels of procedural anarchy. All the more crazy because Din’s Legacy gobbled up all the innovations of its four preceding games.

Vested Id wrote:I'm not even going to respond to the other moron who wonders why cops have a different relationship with strangers than barristas. Stupid and one hopes justice prevails. That's because you're such a cocksucker for authority, you have no argument you weak bitch Lol "who was wondering why". What a coward's way to […]

I mean, they're too dumb to understand they're being filmed by default this week. All one of those children playing dress up had to do after pushing the elderly man down was check on the guy and at least make it look like they gave a shit. "Ah fuck, I'm sorry!" You know. Not act […]

And what I heard it sounds like my kind of game in the early-to-midgame, then the endgame sounds like something I'd hate. I wish they'd stop making games that transition between genres (as opposed to mixing them the whole time). Space Pirates and Zombies 2 to me is the game that most gracefully transitions from […]

Battle Tendency is the only good pa So, I guess I agree? The cliffhanger ending leads to a different, though equally Bizarre, world. Art style changes and some sloppy start/stop writing in "Part 4" lost my interest to continue. No doubt the next cast of characters eat spaghetti al nero di seppia and punch each […]